The Cause of the Canonisation of John Henry Cardinal Newman

Jack Sullivan has visited the Birmingham Oratory in England, the focus of his week-long stay in England. On Wednesday morning, Jack, with his wife Carol, visited Rednal, where Newman was buried among his Oratorian brethren. Jack also visited the Oratory Primary School, where he was interviewed by some of the pupils. He then came to the Oratory, on the Hagley Road, where Newman lived from 1852-1890.

At the Brompton Oratory in London, hundreds of people from all over England came yesterday (10th November) to hear the powerful testimony of Deacon Jack Sullivan, whose healing through Newman’s intercession will culminate in his Beatification next year.

Reverend Jack Sullivan, the Boston deacon healed through Cardinal Newman’s intercession, has spoken of the importance of Newman’s spiritual message in a sermon at Mass in London’s Westminster Cathedral on Monday 9th November. Deacon Sullivan was preaching on the first full day of a week-long visit to England, anticipating Newman’s Beatification next year.

In the midsummer of the year 2000 I was told by a surgeon at a Boston Hospital, after he had analysed scans of my spine, that I needed immediate surgery and that paralysis could be imminent. The surgeon said mine was the worst case he’d seen in 17 years. I was so despondent, because I had worked hard in my diaconate classes, and now it seemed that I would be unable to return to them. At that moment things were very bleak. Watching EWTN [an American Catholic television network] that same day, I saw two priests discussing Cardinal Newman…

Deacon Jack Sullivan, whose miraculous healing in 2001 is the basis for Newman’s Beatification next year, is to visit the Birmingham Oratory (UK) this week, in a event which the Boston deacon has said will be ‘the greatest moment of my life’. His wife Carol will be accompanying him throughout the visit.

Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, President of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, Father Paul Chavasse, Marcello Pera, ex-President of the Italian Senate, together with Newman scholars and Vatican officials, met in Rome last Thursday for the launch of a book which collects papers given at the Newman Conference in Milan in March 2009

The sentiment, of course, is admirable: converts of good conscience should be welcomed by Catholics with open arms. But Newman’s name in this context seems out of place. Having been received into the Catholic Church 164 years ago, and being gone from this world for 119 of them, it is not easy to see how his case can shed light upon the welcome given to converts in our own time. The Tablet rightly says that this is an ‘important issue for all Catholics’; but what does Newman have to do with it?

T he annual pilgrimage to Littlemore took place on Saturday 10 October, bringing together Oratorians, other clergy, and members of the faithful from Birmingham, Oxford and beyond, to mark the anniversary of John Henry Newman’s reception into the Catholic Church on 9 October 1845.